Edwin Rostron makes films that look like thoughts caught mid-flight. Based in London, his animations take an improvisatory, process-based approach rooted in drawing, chance operations and self-imposed rules, with recurring obsessions that range from the paranormal to the unconscious, abstraction, horror and sci-fi. The kind of work that is impossible to categorise and equally impossible to forget. His films have screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pictoplasma, GLAS, EXiS, Eyeworks, New Chitose, BFI and Cafe OTO. His musical collaborators have included Anton Lukoszevieze, Apartment House, Dean Honer and Supreme Vagabond Craftsman, and he has taught at the Royal College of Art, CalArts and Moholy-Nagy University. Edge of Frame, the newsletter and screening series he founded in 2013, has become one of experimental animation’s most important platforms.
At Kinomural he’s showing two films. Help Desk, with sound by Supreme Vagabond Craftsman, is a hypnotic hand-drawn animation where a mysterious transmission communicates playful geometric possibilities, oscillating between flatness and depth, control and instability. Made through a “straight ahead” improvisational process, it was Rostron’s attempt to regain some focus after the fragmented years of the pandemic.
Night Music, with sound by Yokonono, is a little night music for the eyes: the rain falls, a storm approaches.
